Toray Plans to Mass-Produce Carbon Fiber Autoparts

Toray Industries will spend around Y30 billion ($250 million) to build a factory to produce carbon fiber auto parts as early as 2010.

It will be the first company in the world to commercialize such products.

Carbon fiber weighs about one-fourth that of steel but is 10 times stronger.

Car makers want to make their cars lighter to improve fuel-efficiency.

Reducing a car's weight by 100kg can improve the mileage by 2-3%.

A car made with carbon fiber parts can weigh as much as 200kg less and also have much better impact resistance.

The biggest obstacle – high costs…about 10 times that of steel.

Toray will work at developing low-cost molding methods, put the materials in luxury cars and then try to improve the cost-efficiency of the operations.

Boeing Co. made extensive use of carbon fiber for the first time in its 787 passenger plane. Using Toray's carbon fiber for half of the body improved the fuel-efficiency of the jet by about 20%.

Now…if they can just get the price down.

What do you think of Toray's plan?